Tag Archives: Asian College of Journalism

The press council chairman, Justice Markandey Katju, has hit journalists—especially journalists who show off their JNU, St. Stephen’s, ACJ, Presidency, St. Xavier’s, Loyola, IIT-IIM, Colombia, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge credentials in their sentence constructions—where it hurts most.

In saying that he did not think that we have “any knowledge of economic theory or political science or literature or philosophy“, the former Supreme Court judge has stopped just short of calling us idiots and ignoramuses, who presume a divine right to inform, educate and entertain the world, no questions asked.

To no one’s surprise, the egos punctured by Katju have responded in kind (here, here, here).

But there is another way to prove Justice Katju wrong than dashing off indignant press releases reeking with anger and self-righteousness. And that is to show him that we have read something and that we do actually have some knowledge of economic theory, political science, literature and philosophy.

You can take this quiz in confidence, of course, but you are also free to mail the answers to churumuri [dot] churumuri [at] gmail [dot] com with your college certificate to receive the sans serif Official Stamp Of Approval™ . Googling for the answers, Prof Gowda assures us, is akin to “paid news”.

Your time starts now.

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QUOTE ME IF YOU CAN

Who is credited with each of the following quotations?

1.Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

2. A king can protect his kingdom only when he himself is protected from persons near him, particularly his wives and children.

3. The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.

4. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

5. An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

6. Neither in this world nor elsewhere is there any happiness in store for him who always doubts.

7. Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

8. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

9. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

10. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

OR

Why should the village become the locus of the political structure? The village is a ‘cesspool, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and communalism.’ Why would we want to entrust political rule and development to it?

11. You are free, you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of …. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the state. You will find that in course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.

12. Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

OR

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

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Terms & Conditions: This quiz is open only to Indian journalists or journalists of Indian origin. sans serif welcomes news organisations and journalism schools to use this quiz or parts thereof to test the Trivia Quotient of working journalists and student-journalists. sans serif reserves the right to cancel, modify, extend or discontinue the quiz or any part thereof, without giving any reasons or prior notice if Google or Wikipedia has been used. Please allow 2-3 weeks for delivery of sans serif Stamp Of Approval™. All disputes shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the court of public opinion only. If you have read all this and reached this far, congratulations, Justice Katju would like to hear from you.

PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: The media coverage of the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement, like the movement itself, is a story in two parts—and both show the perils of the watchdog becoming the lapdog in diametrically opposite ways.

On the contrary, it can be argued that the pendulum has swung to the other end this time round.

The Times of India and Times Now, both market leaders in number terms, have made no attempt to hide where their sympathies lie in this “Arnab Spring”, when the urban, articulate, newspaper-reading, TV-watching, high-earning, high-spending, apolitical, ahistorical, post-liberalised, pissed-off-like-mad middle-class gets worked up.

When the market leaders go down that road, the others are left with no option but to follow suit.

Obviously neither extreme can be the media’s default position. However, unlike last time when there was little if not no criticism of the “orchestrated campaign of calumny, slander and insinuation“, at least two well known media figures have found the courage to question this kind of wide-eyed, gee-whiz reporting.

Sashi Kumar, the founder of India’s first regional satellite channel Asianet and the brain behind the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), in Outlook*:

“In the race for eyeballs, a section of the media—some TV channels in particular—give the impression of sprinting ahead of the story and dragging it along behind them. What defies imagination, even as it stretches journalistic credibility, is that the messengers become the lead players, directing the route the story will take, conjuring up twists and turns where there are none, and keeping the illusion of news-in-the-making breathlessly alive….

“The relationship between such media and their essentially middle class consumers is becoming uncomfortably incestuous. When respondents cluster around a camera for a vox pop, they are not so much required to offer their independent view on an issue as add to the chorus of opinion orchestrated by the channel. A photo op masquerades as a movement. Dissident voices get short shrift. It is more like a recruitment drive than a professional journalistic exercise to seek and purvey news.

“Increasingly, the channel’s role seems to be to trigger and promote a form of direct democracy by the middle class. Politics and politicians are routinely debunked; even representative democracy doesn’t seem to make the grade.”

NDTV group editor and star anchor Barkha Dutt too strikes a similar note in the Hindustan Times:

“Critics of the Hazare campaign have questioned the media narrative as well, accusing wall-to-wall TV coverage of holding up a permanent oxygen mask to the protests. It’s even been pointed out that Noam Chomsky’s scathing commentary on the mass media -‘Manufacturing Consent’ would be re-written in TV studios today as Manufacturing Dissent.

“But again, if the TV coverage of the protests is overdone, it only proves that the UPA’s perennial disdain for the media — and the diffidence of its top leaders — has given its opponents the upper hand in the information battle. There is something so telling about the fact that 74-year-old Anna Hazare made effective use of the social media by releasing a YouTube message from inside jail and the PM of India’s oldest political party is still to give his first interview to an Indian journalist.”

*Disclosures apply

Photograph: Besides temporary studios set up by almost all the news channels, nearly a dozen Jimmy Jib cameras (swinging cameras on cranes) hover over the heads of those assembled at Anna Hazare‘s fast at the Ramlila grounds in New Delhi on Friday.

The Pioneer's special correspondent, J. Gopikrishnan (second from left, with mike in hand), who brought the 2G scam-tainted telecom minister A. Raja to book, at a colloquium at the Asian College of Journalism in Madras on Wednesday, 1 December 2010 (photo courtesy: The Hindu)

The publication of the Niira Radia tapes by Outlook* and Open magazines has seen the usual clutch of usual suspects—and “suspects” many of them truly are—hog the limelight and shine in reflected glory.

All, except J. Gopikrishnan of The Pioneer, the journalist who (aside from Paranjoy Guha Thakurta) kept pegging away at the 2G spectrum allocation scam, story after story, eventually bringing about the resignation of the telecom minister, A. Raja.

Thankfully, a small correction is on the way.

On Wednesday, Gopikrishnan took part in a colloquium on the Radia tapes organised by the Asian college of journalism (ACJ) in Madras, where he lamented that he had been on the 2G case for nearly two years with very little response, before the tapes burst on the scene and grabbed the attention of the entire nation.

A number of Indian media houses have set up media schools over the years, partly to give something back to the profession, partly because they think existing journalism schools do not turn out recruitment-ready products, but largely to ensure a steady inflow of journalists at a time of heightened competition when everybody is poaching.